poxy 0.9.0

Documentation generator for C++.

poxy

Documentation generator for C++ based on Doxygen and mosra/m.css.

• Overview
• Example
• Installation
• Usage
• Config file options
• Migrating from Doxygen
• Why the name "Poxy"?
• License and Attribution

Overview

mosra/m.css is a Doxygen-based documentation generator that significantly improves on Doxygen's default output by controlling some of Doxygen's more unruly options, supplying it's own slick HTML+CSS generation and adding a fantastic live search feature. Poxy builds upon both by:

• Moving the configuration out into a TOML file
• Preprocessing the Doxygen XML to fix a bunch of Doxygen bugs quirks
• Postprocessing the generated HTML to improve syntax highlighting and add a few other improvements
• Allowing source, image and example directories to be recursive or shallow on a per-directory basis
• Automatically defining C++ language feature macros based on your project's target C++ version
• Automatically integrating the cppreference.com doxygen tagfile
• Providing a number of additional built-in doxygen @alias commands
• Giving more control over the HTML inline using square-bracket [tags][/tags]
• Adding a switchable light theme
• Adding support for C++20 concepts
• Self-hosting fonts to reduce external HTTP requests
• Inlining SVGs so they can take advantage of currentColor
• Quite a bit more!

Example

The homepage + documentation for toml++ is built using poxy:

• homepage: marzer.github.io/tomlplusplus
• config file: poxy.toml

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.5+
• Doxygen 1.8.20+

Then:

pip install poxy

Usage

Poxy is a command-line application.

poxy [-h] [-v] [--doxygen <path>] [--dry] [--threads N] [--version] [--werror] [--xmlonly]
            [--ppinclude <regex>] [--ppexclude <regex>] [--theme {auto,light,dark,custom}]
            [config]

Generate fancy C++ documentation.

positional arguments:
  config                path to poxy.toml or a directory containing it (default: .)

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         enable very noisy diagnostic output
  --doxygen <path>      specify the Doxygen executable to use (default: find on system path)
  --dry                 do a 'dry run' only, stopping after emitting the effective Doxyfile
  --threads N           set the number of threads to use (default: automatic)
  --version             print the version and exit
  --werror              always treat warnings as errors regardless of config file settings
  --xmlonly             stop after generating and preprocessing the Doxygen xml
  --ppinclude <regex>   pattern matching HTML file names to post-process (default: all)
  --ppexclude <regex>   pattern matching HTML file names to exclude from post-processing (default: none)
  --theme {auto,light,dark,custom}
                        the CSS theme to use (default: auto)

The basic three-step to using Poxy is similar to Doxygen:

1. Create your poxy.toml (Poxy's answer to the Doxyfile)
2. Invoke Poxy on it: poxy path/to/poxy.toml (or simply poxy if the cwd contains the config file)
3. See your HTML documentation <cwd>/html

ℹ️ If there exists a Doxyfile or Doxyfile-mcss in the same directory as your poxy.toml it will be loaded first, then the Poxy overrides applied on top of it. Otherwise a 'default' Doxyfile is used as the base.

Config file options

For a self-contained poxy.toml example to copy and paste from, see the one used by toml++.

For a full list of options, with full descriptions, schemas and usage examples, see the Configuration options wiki page.

Migrating from Doxygen

Generally the relevant Doxyfile options will have a corresponding poxy.toml option (or be replaced by something more specific) so migration is largely a transcription and box-ticking exercise, though there are a few gotchas:

⚠️ The majority of Doxygen's options are controlled by Poxy

Many of Doxygen's various knobs and switches are manually overridden by Poxy, and are not configurable. This is intentional! Doxygen tends to break in hilarious and fantastic ways from one release to the next; reducing it to a very 'locked-down' back-end minimizes the damage future regressions can do, allowing me to keep most debugging python-side.

If there is some Doxygen feature you would like exposed in Poxy, please create a feature request.

⚠️ All relative input paths are relative to the config file, not CWD

This is in contrast to Doxygen, which has all paths be relative to the Doxygen process' current working directory regardless of where the Doxyfile was. I've always personally found that to be nothing but a source of error, so Poxy does away with it.

⚠️ Output is always emitted to CWD

Poxy always emits the output html to <cwd>/html. This is largely to simplify the HTML post-process step.

⚠️ Poxy config files are self-contained

There is no equivalent to Doxygen's @INCLUDE. If your project is structured in such a way that a multi-level Doxyfile hierarchy is necessary, Poxy isn't for you.

Why the name "Poxy"?

Originally it was simply called "dox", but there's already a C++ documentation project with that name, so I smashed "python" and "dox" together and this is what I came up with.

Also "poxy" can be slang for cheap, inferior, poor quality, etc., which I thought was funny.

License and Attribution

This project is published under the terms of the MIT license.

Significant credit must go to Vladimír Vondruš (mosra) and his amazing m.css framework. Poxy bundles a fork of m.css, used per the MIT/Expat license (which can also be found in the installed python package).

Changelog

v0.9.0 - 2022-10-03

• added support for C++20 concepts

v0.8.2 - 2022-10-01

• added post-process to inline all local SVGs
• minor style fixes

v0.8.1 - 2022-09-30

• minor style fixes

v0.8.0 - 2022-09-29

• added config option gitlab (#13) (@wroyca)
• added ixx module extension in source patterns (#11) (@wroyca)
• added support for multi-codepoint emojis
• improved doxygen.exe location discovery on Windows
• improved CHANGELOG location discovery
• moved all poxy assets in the generated HTML to html/poxy
• self-hosted google fonts in generated HTML (instead of requiring additional HTTP requests on page load) (#6)
• removed ability to override m.css implementation
• removed legacy support for reading config options from neighbouring Doxyfiles
• overhauled the light theme
• many minor style fixes and tweaks

v0.7.1 - 2022-08-17

• fixed crash on python <= 3.8 (#9) (@wroyca)

v0.7.0 - 2022-08-16

• fixed some <link>, <meta> and <script> tags not being included in <head> when a file was excluded from post-processing
• added theme command-line option
• added html_header config option option
• added automatic generation of github links in changelog when config option github is set
• added new light theme
• added dynamic switch for dark/light theme
• removed text from github icon on navbar (#5) (@wroyca)
• removed excessive spacing between article sections (#5) (@wroyca)
• many minor style fixes and tweaks

v0.6.1 - 2022-08-16

• fixed multi-row navbar occluding page content (#3) (@wroyca)

v0.6.0 - 2022-08-14

• fixed malformed error messages in some circumstances
• added builtin C++ standard macros for C++23
• added changelog config option
• updated cppreference.com tagfile

v0.5.7 - 2022-05-17

• fixed being able to pass >= 33 threads to Doxygen's NUM_PROC_THREADS

v0.5.6 - 2022-05-14

• fixed path error when using --dry
• fixed friend keyword sometimes leaking into function return types
• added additional language code block aliases
• added --nocleanup to --help output
• added support for C++20's consteval keyword

v0.5.5 - 2022-04-16

• fixed C++20 concepts causing a crash in m.css (they are now skipped with a warning) (#1) (@jake-arkinstall)

v0.5.4 - 2022-04-15

• updated m.css
• updated emoji database

v0.5.3 - 2021-12-12

• fixed Doxygen bug that would sometimes treat keywords like friend as part of a function's return type
• Blacklisted schema 0.7.5 because it's broken

v0.5.2 - 2021-11-02

• fixed over-eager link-replacement for internal #anchor links
• added command-line options --ppinclude and --ppexclude

v0.5.1 - 2021-10-09

• fixed over-eager link replacement causing text to be deleted

v0.5.0 - 2021-09-11

• fixed a crash during HTML post-processing
• fixed implementation_headers not working when paths use backslashes
• added warnings when implementation_headers doesn't match anything

v0.4.5 - 2021-06-08

• added command-line option --xmlonly

v0.4.3 - 2021-05-31

• fixed regression in [code_blocks] functionality
• fixed minor issues in syntax highlighter
• added symbols from doxygen tagfiles to the syntax highlighter
• minor style tweaks

v0.4.1 - 2021-05-30

• fixed .dirs being glommed as source paths
• added config option scripts
• added config option stylesheets
• added config option jquery
• added custom theme
• added ability to use HOME.md as main page
• added additional fix for inline <code> blocks
• added .poxy-toc to table-of-contents elements
• added floating page table-of-contents
• removed m.css favicon fallback
• made improvements to the light and dark themes
• updated C++ doxygen tagfile

v0.4.0 - 2021-05-29

• added config option theme
• added version number to CSS and javascript filenames to prevent browser cache issues
• added POXY_IMPLEMENTATION_DETAIL(...) magic macro
• added POXY_IGNORE(...) magic macro
• fixed alignment of nested images inside detail blocks

v0.3.4 - 2021-05-28

• added basic using alias detection to syntax highlighter
• added missing badges for C++23, 26 and 29

v0.3.3 - 2021-05-23

• fixed sorting of namespace and group members
• fixed m.css failing with new versions of doxygen due to Doxyfile.xml
• added google structured data to \pages

v0.3.2 - 2021-05-19

• fixed formatting of <meta> tags
• added config option author
• added config option robots
• added markup tag [p]
• added markup tag [center]

v0.3.1 - 2021-05-13

• added config option macros
• added command-line option --version

v0.3.0 - 2021-05-09

• Improved handling of m.css and Doxygen warnings and errors
• added command-line option --doxygen
• added command-line option --werror
• added markup tag [set_parent_class]
• added markup tag [add_parent_class]
• added markup tag [remove_parent_class]
• added config option images
• added config option examples
• added ability to specify tagfiles as URIs

v0.2.1 - 2021-05-07

• fixed some minor autolinking issues

v0.2.0 - 2021-05-06

• added config option source_patterns

v0.1.2 - 2021-05-02

• fixed the Z-order of the nav bar being higher than the search overlay
• added NDEBUG to the default set of defines

v0.1.1 - 2021-04-26

• added an additional cleanup step to the HTML postprocessor

v0.1.0 - 2021-04-26

First public release :tada: